Thursday, September 19, 2013

Jordan and I have a king-size bed. After our second child, Ivey, was born, we decided we wanted to upgrade from a queen, and when Robert was born 20 months later, we certainly were glad to have it! Unfortunately, though, it took up a good chunk of our bedroom. With no garage and not very many closets, we were feeling crunched for space, so we recently decided to take action.

Before we thought of doing anything in our room, we got our oldest, Suzi the Artist, a twin-size loft bed with a long desk underneath and put it in our craft room. Now it's a Suzi/craft room, which works out since Suzi is so frequently doing crafts. No pictures of that yet; the whole room needs a good decluttering! But Suzi loves it and it solved several space issues we were having. When we saw how well that worked out, we wondered: Why not loft our king-size bed?

Yes, it's possible! We googled and found lots of inspiration. This bed by M.C. Woodworks is one of my favorites. There are also a few examples of loft beds with stairs that open to offer easy-access storage space! It took us two weekends to get it done, but here is our finished project.

Steps with storage underneath! They are close enough to the wall that getting in and out of bed is safe and easy. They do not flip open--we decided against that. But there is still a good bit of storage space underneath them that we can access from underneath our loft.

We didn't spend much money at all on the things we put under our loft. First we have our two nightstands, which we obviously can't use as nightstands anymore. We added an inexpensive white shelf for books. A few months ago we found a dining room chair with broken legs on the side of the road, and removed the legs completely, planning to turn it into a swing. Until we can do that, it'll serve as seating under our loft. The kids love listening to records on my 1980's Fisher-Price record player, especially while they relax in our hammock, which we found at a yard sale for $3!

So, after a couple of weekends of thinking, planning, hard work, and a little reorganizing, we now have a brand new (and much needed) area to hang out and relax, where there absolutely could not have been one before. It was so worth it!

P.S. We aren't experts and you could probably find a really good, detailed tutorial somewhere else, but if you want to know more about how we made our loft, shoot me an email or leave a comment. It really wasn't that hard!